


Skeleton at the Feast

by TF Grognon (gloss)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Female Post-Apocalyptic Food Truck Owner & Hungry Female Traveler, Gen, Older Lesbian Character, Post-Apocalypse, Reference to cancer, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27355633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/TF%20Grognon
Summary: A grieving food truck driver meets a very strange traveler.
Relationships: Original Female Character & Original Female Character
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7
Collections: Fic In A Box





	Skeleton at the Feast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blahblahwhy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blahblahwhy/gifts).



> Originally posted November 11; redated for author reveals.

Duvall was more than a day late when she made it to Cherry Point. Her diesel converter had blown a valve a few days back and she'd had to scramble around Camp Dale to trade for a replacement. The pickings were scarce, to put it mildly. With the sudden advent of the cold season (at least a month earlier than anyone could remember), Dale's population was even more sparse than usual.

Once Duvall got back on the highway, she thought she could make up the time. Persistent sleet and many more cracks and holes in the asphalt than she'd seen just six months ago, however, kept her progress slow. Her truck, as over-packed and teetering on its narrow chassis as it was, would never be fast. She bent over the wheel and murmured encouragement, as if her own stubborn determination could increase the machine's speed.

She didn't actually believe that the engine could be coaxed. It wasn't an animal. Its soul was unknown to her, inaccessible. She didn't _not_ believe, however. In her time driving these broken roads, she'd seen enough strange sights and experienced enough curious coincidences not to hedge her bets. 

She pulled over when dark fell. Had she been on schedule, she'd already be in Cherry Point. The dinner crowd would be thinning, like the artificial light in the face of the dark, and she would be sweaty, feet aching and face, too, from smiling. Instead, she was still alone, back cramped from the cold.

On the narrow shelf that served as her bed, wrapped in her sleeping bag, she lit the night's balsam twig, fanning it lightly until the sap caught and started to steam. Closing her eyes, she cast her thoughts out to the dark. When the twig had burned down to sticky ash, she doused it and lay down to sleep. Her dreams were threaded with the sharp, sticky scent of needles whispering under the wind.

*

She took to the road after losing her wife. Home was no longer home, after all, especially as she discovered that she couldn't bear to remain in any one place for very long. In addition to their cabin, she traded Ji-Yeon's small collection of books and tapes for the body of an old tram car. She spent several weeks first welding it to their old, much-cosseted pickup, then building up the resulting space into a mobile kitchen and small sleeping area.

The result was ungainly, but no more so than the other vehicles out there. It was, honestly, more streamlined, better designed than some houses — though that wasn't saying much.

She drove a circuit of camps and enclaves along the shore of the Sudden Sea and then out along a few navigable highways. The roads that still survived were massive things tossed out over the land like fishing nets. At best, their surfaces were pockmarked and cracked; at worst, they'd snapped apart and awkward little by-ways now looped between the two ends like anxious friends attempting to mediate an angry divorce.

*

She got an early start, setting out at first light. The sleet fell through the nacreous dawn, obscuring any distinction between sky and road. 

Fifty kilometers outside Cherry Point, she should have seen the Sudden Sea start to glint on the horizon. She pulled up to the toll gate, impatient but resigned to the delay, but there was no one on duty. 

This wasn't one of the more critical gates on the road — it was usually staffed by three paunchy older guys, two brothers and their childhood best friend (she never knew which was which, just that that was the configuration) — and they liked to mosey around when they did get a visitor. They were militia in name only at this point, put out to field up here with badges and semis but little more authority than that.

After ten minutes of waiting, Duvall pulled the handle on her jerry-rigged horn.

The sleet fell at a slant, so she couldn't see the gate cabin well. The sleet was also dripping through gaps in the tarp she'd pulled over the roof, whose metal blossomed with rusty openwork. The sleet slid down the back of her neck and pip-plopped onto the windshield. She was shivering as well as impatient and increasingly concerned, then, when a sword sliced through her plastifilm window, grazing her cheek.

Duvall ducked and threw herself across the cab, fumbling for the sidearm she kept on the passenger seat. She found it, though with her left hand, and rolled onto her side, raising the gun.

"What do you want?" she called.

"Whatever you got," a hoarse voice replied. All she could make out was the rusty edge of a shitty katana. It wobbled a little as its wielder moved it blindly around the truck's cab. It looked for all the world like an antenna or scope evaluating an alien environment; she thought, briefly but unshakably, of the robots armed with angled mirrors sent trundling into dying reactors. "Taking it all!"

"I've got a gun," she said as calmly as she could.

The sword paused. 

There was a strange, wet _oof_ sound, then something knocked hollowly against the door. Where the blade had been, a face appeared in the ripped window: A young woman, smiling broadly, waving energetically.

"Hi, there!" Her bright mood was disconcerting, to say the least. Unnerving might have been more accurate. _Disturbing_ , Duvall would come to think in a few hours.

"I'm holding a gun," Duvall said.

"I can see that! Put it down?" After a moment, she added, her brow furrowing up, "Please?"

"Where's your sword?"

"I don't have a sword!" She leaned down, ducking out of view, then reappeared, holding a small man — or an old-looking child, it was difficult to tell — by the scruff of his neck. "He did! Why? Do you want it?"

In her hold, the body swayed like a dead thing. Sleet passed before it, behind it, but it was heavy and still. What motion it had was not its own, but reactive. Gravitational.

Duvall blinked away sweat and sleet from her eyes, but her vision did not improve much. "What did you do to him?"

The woman winked. "He won't be bothering you, don't worry!"

"I'm not worried," Duvall said, drawing herself against the far side of the cab, switching the gun to her better hand, and speaking as slowly and naturally as she could manage. "Call me curious. What happened?"

"Looked like he was giving you a bad time," the woman said. "I don't like that."

She smiled — not again, she was continuously smiling, but somehow _more_. Her hair was done up in thick braids circling her skull, woven with bits of shell and vine and even small flowers. Those must have been plastic, Duvall assumed, given the late season and cold up here.

"You're welcome, by the way," the woman said when Duvall remained silent.

"Thank you," she said, though she had not yet made up her mind about whatever it was that had just happened.

With her free hand, she gave Duvall a big, cartoonish **OK!** gesture with thumb and forefinger in a circle. "No sweat!"

The dead man in her other hand dropped suddenly with another, quieter _wet_ thump.

Duvall swallowed. Her palms were sweating. "Lucky you came along when you did."

"Sure was!" She grabbed the door with both hands, then shook it lightly, as if testing it. "But it wasn't luck."

"No?"

"I was waiting," she said while at the same time lifting herself up and forward into the cab through the torn window.

Duvall imagined kicking out, catching her in the face, shooting her: anything that might have stopped her, or even slowed her down. 

She was not that young any longer. She was more cautious these days, slower to act, stiffer in every joint. Her knuckles ached as she gripped the gun and the barrel shook slightly.

"Don't shoot me," the woman told her, still smiling. "I really don't want to die."

"Understandable," Duvall said. "What _do_ you want?"

"I just want a ride, and something to eat, and, hey, maybe a friend! You want to be my friend, right?"

Swallowing dryly, Duvall nodded. "Rather be friends than not, that's for sure."

"Great!" She gripped the wheel and mimed spinning it this way and that, before slumping back, her hands falling into her lap. She was wrapped in a large oilskin parka that reached past her calves. "One problem."

"What's that?" Duvall asked.

"I can't drive."

"You don't have to," Duvall heard herself say. Her sinuses throbbed; her brainpan filled with panicked static. "It's my truck. I can drive."

The woman scowled as she thought it over — as if Duvall's statement were something to be evaluated before accepting or rejecting. "But then you could leave."

"What's your name?" Duvall asked.

"Tundra," she replied. "Usually."

"I'm Duvall. How about you trust me, Tundra? I'll drive us up to the sea and then we'll see where we go from there."

She didn't know where this calm was coming from. She certainly didn't feel calm, yet here she was, engaging civilly, negotiating with a madwoman.

As Tundra nodded slowly, the ornaments in her hair tinkled. Duvall remembered, with a sharp twist in her gut, wind chimes in the spring. "All right."

Before Duvall could open her door, Tundra threw herself across the cab to stop her. "I'll get out! You slide over."

"Why?" 

The woman smelled like travel-sweat and diesel — nothing unusual there — and she just shook her head rather than answer. She wiggled out the driver's side door, feet first, keeping her eyes on Duvall. They were wide, showing the whites all around. She was terrified, as terrified as she had been cheerful a moment or so ago.

Duvall said, "I'm not getting out. See? I'll slide over when you get around here."

Tundra took the long way around the truck, which surprised Duvall. What was she looking for? When she reappeared, she approached the toll gate first and pulled it apart, like it was made of raffia.

When she knocked on the passenger window, Duvall shifted across the cab, back into the driver's seat.

"See?" Duvall said coaxingly. "Right here. Nothing happened."

Tundra's arms were crossed, her hands stuffed up the sleeves. "Let's get out of here."

"Way ahead of you," Duvall said, backing up a little before approaching the gate. "You sure did a number on the gate."

Tundra nodded. "I'm pretty strong."

"I'll say." 

The truck hit something, a lump on the road, but before Duvall could react, Tundra grabbed the wheel, saying tightly, "Keep going."

"Going," Duvall said and pressed on the gas pedal. She checked a side mirror, saw a long red streak in gray slush, then brought her eyes back to the road. She thought about asking again what had happened, but did she actually want to know?

With most things in this world, she'd learned, there was no use in knowing. There'd been no way to know about the cancer creeping with black, indomitable fingers through Ji-Yeon, from her stomach to her lungs and down into the center of her bones. No one knew until it was too late, when the sudden force of knowing blew her over and laid her out.

You just had to ride it out.

She and Tundra were silent for a few klicks. It had been ages since Duvall drove with anyone else. Having another body in the cab was neither comfortable nor unsettling. It was just strange.

"What do you cook?" Tundra asked as the truck slowed for a sharp turn. "Your sign, it says MOVABLE FEAST."

"It does," Duvall replied. "I cook whatever I can get, basically. Lotta stews, hand-pies, hot and homey."

"Hot and homey," Tundra echoed, a little wistfully.

"It's been mushrooms for the most part," Duvall continued. "Jellyfish and bivalves when we get to the sea."

"The fuck're bivalves?" She sounded angry, as if Duvall had just insulted her personally.

"They're...clams," Duvall said. "Meat's inside a shell with hinges."

"Oh, _those_." Tundra wriggled and drew her feet up onto the edge of the seat, her bent knees against her chest. "Hate them. Taste like snot. Chewy and gross."

Duvall laughed. She wasn't calm, she knew that. Maybe she'd given up, resigned herself to the dark, but she didn't think that was true, either. "Not the way I make them. You'll see."

Tundra chewed on the corner of her mouth for a bit, then said, "Huh, all right."

The sea was resolving into view, despite the snow mixing with the sleet. An enormous sheet of ruffled gray, it filled the horizon and pushed into the foreground with rounded, implacable lobes. A few old trees still stuck their heads above the surface, stripped bare and dead black, but there were fewer and fewer of those each year.

When she pulled into the encampment, Duvall asked, "You want to hang out here while I set up, or what?"

As if she had a say in what Tundra did.

Tundra hugged her legs against her chest and slid further down, out of sight.

"All right," Duvall said. 

Her friend Rosalie ran up as Duvall was unlatching the metal curtain and raising it into an awning over the serving area.

Flushed and chattering, nearly incoherent, Rosalie demanded to know what had happened.

"Got held up at the toll gate," Duvall told her.

"Those guys'll talk your ear off and then some," put in Rosalie as she helped get down the folding tables. "Gets lonely down there, I expect."

From the roof, where she was untying a stack of chairs, Duvall shook her head. "No. I got _held up_ , Rosie."

It took Rosie a couple moments, but when she understood, her eyes widened. "You did not."

Duvall didn't dignify that with a response. She busied herself with pulling down the folding chairs from their stack, flapping each one open, and arraying them in a messy semi-circle in front of the wagon.

"Still got some meat for me?" she asked when they were finished.

"Couple bushels of clams," Rosie said, "six dozen jellies. Some smoked."

"Okay," Duvall replied, already mentally sifting through her pantry and recipes. "Yeah, all right."

She could work with that. She might even have a second pair of hands in the kitchen to help.


End file.
